Forrest Gump's film version invented the leg braces and the famous run
Two of the most remembered things in Forrest Gump, the childhood leg braces and the years-long run across America, never happen in Winston Groom's novel. The 1994 film took the first eleven chapters, jumped to the ending, and rebuilt its hero into the plainer, gentler figure that audiences adopted.
Robert Zemeckis directed the adaptation from a screenplay by Eric Roth, with Tom Hanks as the Alabama man who drifts through twentieth-century America. Shooting ran from August to December 1993, mostly in Georgia and the two Carolinas. Heavy visual effects placed Hanks inside archive footage, so that Forrest appears beside John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon. Dick Cavett was the one well-known figure who played himself on set, made up to look younger.
The book's Gump is a different creature. He fails gym and craft at university yet scores perfectly in advanced physics, and later works as an astronaut, a wrestler and a chess player. The film dropped those turns, keeping the shrimp business and the meeting with Forrest Jr, and added the braces that break off when bullies chase him, revealing his speed. Even the illness that kills Jenny is ambiguous: Groom meant hepatitis C, while some filmmakers have said they had HIV in mind.
Casting produced small stories of its own. Hanks borrowed the Southern drawl of Michael Conner Humphreys, the child who played young Forrest, instead of asking the boy to imitate him. Haley Joel Osment landed his first feature role after a casting director saw him in a 1993 Pizza Hut advert, and Kurt Russell, uncredited, voiced the young Elvis Presley.
Paramount released the film on 6 July 1994. It cost 55 million dollars and took more than 678 million worldwide, second that year only to The Lion King, while the soundtrack sold over 12 million copies. It won six Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor for Hanks, and in 2011 the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry. Its politics have been read in several competing ways ever since.
Source: Forrest Gump
